Aisha Akhtar

Animals in laboratories never have a good day.

They suffer day in and day out.

But the good news is that we are on the brink of a major revolution in medical research, in which we are using methods that are based on human biology and that are so much more effective than animal experiments ever have been.

Sure.

So it's like playing a piano.

So all pianos have the same keys, such as like all humans and other animals share many of the same genes.

But the difference in how you play the piano is...

can lead to very different results.

So you can play the keys in one way, you can get Chopin.

You can play them in another way, and you can get Jerry Lee Lewis.

And it's the same as with genes.

So although we share similar, in many cases the same genes with other animals,

How they are expressed, it differs.

People say, oh, well, you know, we got this drug by using animals and so on and so on.

Well, the problem is, is that by default, animals are required for testing.

So by default, animals are always used in the development of drugs and vaccines.

What if you use something else, something more human relevant?

Would we have gotten that vaccine sooner and maybe even gotten a better vaccine, a safer vaccine?

Well, one of the big concerns we have now is that there may have been hundreds, thousands of drugs that would have worked, maybe even been cures and would have been safe in humans, but they were never allowed to go on into human testing because of results in animals that were misleading.

So you mentioned tamoxifen.